Oklahoma Politics: February 2026 Archives

Monday was the first day of the second regular session of the 60th Oklahoma Legislature. State Senators have filed 2,183 bills over the course of this two-year legislature and State Representatives have filed 3,506. Many if not most of those bills have been offered in reaction to some failure, inefficiency, or abuse. The hope is that adding a rule or clarifying an existing rule will halt the abuse, prevent something important from falling through the cracks, and make government more efficient.

This is a deep impulse in the American psyche. There used to be a comic strip called "There Oughta Be a Law!" where readers submitted frustrating situations that presumably could be mitigated by legislation. The Daily Oklahoman had a regular feature of the same name, highlighting ideas for new laws to make life better. In one of the first installments, appearing in the January 3, 1968, edition, Mrs. Dorothy J. Jones of 700 Musgrave Blvd., Oklahoma City, proposed:

"A person should not be able to buy his auto tag without proof of his coverage by both kinds of insurance and notice of any subsequent cancellations would be forwarded to the state." She suggests the driver's license would then be revoked or the car tag taken away until coverage is again secured. She complains that it is difficult for one whose property was damaged by another without insurance to get compensation.

After more than a half-century of discussion, that actually became a law in Oklahoma in 1976 and is still the law today, with many subsequent amendments to close various loopholes. When first passed, the law only required car owners to sign a statement affirming that they had liability insurance when they went to renew their tags. Eventually, we had to bring proof of insurance to the tag agency, and then the law had to deal with the possibility that someone might take out a policy for just long enough to get the tag, then drop it. Even with all the additional safeguards, in 2023 an estimated 12.0% of Oklahoma drivers did not carry the required liability insurance. In 7 states and DC, that proportion topped 20%. Many of us pay extra for Uninsured Motorist coverage to protect us when one of these clowns runs a red light.

Among this year's bills is a proposal to tighten the Oklahoma Open Meeting Act by prohibiting any two or more members of a public body from discussing business privately. Currently, a public body is required to post a meeting notice and allow the public to observe any deliberations involving a quorum (usually > 50%) of the body's membership. The notion behind that threshold is that a quorum is required to conduct business, and less than a quorum can't take any official action. That still allows advisory committees to deliberate privately, but any final decision has to be made in public. The problem comes when what should be contentious and debatable proposals, such as the list of non-profits that will receive a share of a federal grant to the city, are approved in the public meeting without a word of debate; clearly the matter was decided in private.

That's the particular scenario that former Tulsa City Councilor Grant Miller is trying to combat. A committee of four councilors (Phil Lakin, Vanessa Hall Harper, Jeannie Cue, and Lori Decter Wright), meeting as the ARPA Working Group, decided which non-profits would receive a share of federal COVID relief grants. As far as I've been able to determine, no substantive discussion of the list took place in a City Council open meeting. This is clearly an abuse. This Substack post by Miller offers several recent examples of the City Council and Mayor exploiting this loophole. Miller has a two-pronged remedy, which the City Council could adopt itself in an unexpected fit of integrity, or the State Legislature could impose it right away.

If a task force or working group is created by the City Council and tasked with influencing public spending, it should automatically qualify as a public body under the Open Meeting Act. The Council can make that the rule with a single vote -- by adopting a policy that all multi-member advisory groups, regardless of size, are subject to public notice, agendas, and minutes....

When major issues are briefed privately to councilors, the public is left with a fragmented view of how policy evolves. The Council could set a rule that any policy briefing involving more than two members must be noticed and open. That eliminates the serial-meeting workaround -- the "three here, three there" pattern that turns the quorum rule into a shell game.

State Sen. Brian Guthrie, who previously served as Mayor of Bixby and thus also on the Bixby City Council, has proposed several reforms to the Open Meeting Act. He has filed a bill, SB 2161, which would expand the definition of meeting. It's along the lines of what Grant Miller proposes, but broader in scope:

Any task force, working group, advisory group, study group, committee, subcommittee, or other group which is convened or created by a public body to discuss and deliberate, for the purpose of making recommendations to the public body, regardless of the number of members present, shall constitute a meeting of the public body.

And by making it a meeting of the public body, a notice and agenda would have to be posted in advance and filed with the County Clerk, and the public would be allowed to attend. If Sen. Guthrie's SB 1252 passes, the public would be allowed to comment on every item that involves taking action. Effectively, any informal conversation about policy between any two or more members of a City Council or school board or utility authority would be prohibited.

County Commissioners have been living with this constraint since the Open Meeting Act was passed, because there are only three commissioners in every county in Oklahoma, and any two of the three constitute a quorum. Nevertheless, there may not be much debate or disagreement when an item comes up for a public vote. I remember being amazed when the Tulsa County commissioners, sitting as the Tulsa County Industrial Authority, voted, without debate, to divide the billion-dollar Vision 2025 revenue bonds between two bond companies, one affiliated with Bank of Oklahoma, the other with F&M Bank. Similar no-debate votes had decided which projects would appear on the Vision 2025 ballot and how those projects would be grouped. How could such complex matters be decided without public debate, when it violates the Open Meeting Act for any two commissioners to discuss public business?

I'm not sure how Bob Dick, Randi Miller, and Wilbert Collins reached their consensus outside of the public eye back in 2003, but these days the process involves deputy county commissioners. Each county commissioner appoints a First Deputy. The First Deputy is not answerable to the voters. The First Deputy is not confirmed by any other public body. When county commissioners want to reach a private consensus on a public issue, each instructs his respective deputy, and then the three deputies meet and deliberate out of the public eye. They aren't public officials, so the three deputies can discuss public business privately without violating the letter of the Open Meeting Act. Each First Deputy communicates the conversation to his respective county commissioner. There could be multiple rounds of negotiations with the First Deputies acting as go-betweens. Theoretically, the First Deputies could be making the actual decisions with the county commissioners as mere figureheads. Who would ever know?

So here is an unintended consequence of well-intentioned sunshine laws: Deliberations about matters of public interest are carried out in private among assistants who have not been in any way vetted by the voters.

Sen. Guthrie is wise to this loophole and has proposed a bill to close it. SB 832 adds the phrase "including deputy commissioners" to the definition of "public body," in the Oklahoma Open Meeting Act.

It's easy to imagine how this could be evaded. If the deputy commissioners can't be go-betweens for the commissioners, use some other county employees, or people who aren't county employees. They could be lobbyists or lawyers or spouses or siblings or sons-in-law, just as long as they don't have the job title of deputy commissioner.

The same strategy could be adopted by other public bodies if SB 2161 passes. Any group of third parties could be used to discuss public business privately, and the taxpayers won't even know who is having the conversation.

What would help more than another rule to keep the process honest is for voters to elect enough cantankerous, thick-skinned city councilors to insist on discussing each line item in public, rather than allowing proposals to be approved without debate. Grant Miller tried valiantly, but as one of nine he was easily neutralized by the rest, although they had to resort to lies to destroy his career and his reputation. Big campaign donors spend a lot of money to keep intelligent, independent-minded people out of public office; they support agreeable people who want to be liked, because those people will do what they're told to do. That money is spent to convince voters that credulous, compromised toadies are intelligent and virtuous, while intelligent and virtuous candidates are bickering troublemakers.

I used to have a lot of faith in structural solutions to bad governance. Change the rules, fix the problem. If only we had term limits. If only Republican candidates had to pledge support for the platform. If only we had stricter campaign reporting requirements. If only we changed the voting method or election calendar to make elected officials more or less responsive to popular sentiment. Rule changes can be beneficial, can add some friction to resist the deviousness of bad officials, and may be worth doing even if they won't fully fix the problem, but they can also penalize good officials. Term limits got rid of Gene Stipe, but they also got rid of Jason Murphey and Nathan Dahm. A new rule might be the right thing, but the bad guys always seem to find a way around those rules, and often find ways to use the same rules to beat the good guys up.

The 17th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution is another example of a well-intentioned reform that failed to accomplish the aims of its proponents. Repealing it would also fail to produce the hoped-for results.

A growing number of conservatives have been calling for repeal of the 17th Amendment, which requires direct popular election of senators, along with the 16th Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax. (We have already repealed one of the four Progressive Era amendments, the 18th. A few radicals think the 19th ought to go as well.) Anti-17ers point out that the Framers of the Constitution expected the Senate, whose members would be appointed by their respective state legislatures, to represent the interests of state governments, acting as a check on the growth and power of the federal government, while the House would represent the people. There are distinctions between House and Senate that remain in the Constitution, distinctions that only make sense if the two chambers are meant to represent different constituencies: All bills for raising revenue must originate in the House, the representatives of the people. Senators, representing the states, provide advice and consent on executive and judicial officers and on treaties.

Of course, the people who pushed for the 17th Amendment (which passed a Senate filled with members elected by state legislators) believed they were defeating corruption and taking money out of politics. Constitutional scholar C. H. Hoebeke wrote about the 17th Amendment's adoption and the false hopes it inspired:

It was with no small sense of vindication that Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan signed the proclamation of 31 May 1913, declaring the Seventeenth Amendment duly ratified and incorporated into the fundamental laws of the United States. More than twenty years earlier as a Nebraska congressman, "The Great Commoner" had joined the struggle to free the Senate from the control of corrupt state legislatures, and despite three failed campaigns for the presidency, he never wavered in his determination to make the Senate a popularly elected body. Now, after the most protracted political battle in that usually bloodless revolution historians refer to as the Progressive Era, Secretary Bryan put his seal upon the reform that, in the expectations of those who had labored for it, would end the dominance of party "bosses" and the state "machines," stamp out the undue influence of special interests in the Senate, make it more responsive to the will of the people, and of course, eliminate, or greatly reduce, the execrable practice of spending large sums of money to get elected.

As we shall see, even while the amendment was still being considered by the American public, there were ample reasons to doubt its effectiveness and to question the credulity, if not the integrity, of those who proposed it. But more than eight decades after the amendment, the current condition of Senate elections and Senate politics makes the sanguine predictions of 1913 look wholly naïve. Progressive Era reformers scandalized by the rare campaign expenditure of a hundred thousand dollars might be shocked senseless to learn that by the 1990s the average cost of a Senate seat would be well over five million dollars, that a candidate would not even approach the threshold of scandal until he had spent fifteen or twenty million dollars. If there was once cause for concern in the muckraking stories of industrial tycoons and railroad barons buying Senate influence through contributions to the state legislators, then the largess of lobbyists and activists that is today handed openly and directly to Senate candidates (overwhelmingly in favor of incumbents) should be a cause for outright alarm. And if in 1913 the old-time brokers of Senate elections were cleared from their smoke-filled rooms, the current regime of media consultants, professional pollsters, mass-market specialists, and "constituent-minded" software is hardly the victory over political cynicism that Bryan and the Progressives had envisioned.

That was in 1996, and things have only gotten worse. But even at the time, there were good reasons to doubt the value of the reform. Hoebeke continues (emphasis added):

In direct contradiction to the reformers' contention that the Senate, elected by the legislatures, was too unresponsive and too corrupted and that it would never yield to the demands of the people until placed directly under their control, two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the legislatures concurred in a constitutional revision alleged to be against their political self-interest. The very adoption of the amendment would seem to call into question its necessity. Furthermore, considering not only that the Senate itself endorsed the amendment but that all of the legislatively elected incumbents renominated for Senate seats went on to win in the popular elections of 1914, it is difficult to determine precisely which of the "special interests" had been defeated by its ratification. Add to these considerations the utter failure to remove the influence of money and the fact that the much-maligned electioneering machines appear not so much to have been overthrown as to have adapted their tactics, and it is not merely the necessity of the amendment that is called into question, but the validity of the assumptions on which it was advanced.

I encourage you to read the entire article, and Hoebeke has also written a book on the subject, The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment. As foolishly hopeful as 17th Amendment advocates were, history shows that the pre-17th system had drifted far from the Framers' expectations. Mass democracy was already shaping the election of senators long before the 17th was ratified. As early as 1834, Senate candidates began making the general public the target of their campaigns, encouraging voters to select legislators who would vote for their preferred Senate candidate. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were not held to influence Illinois legislators but the voters who would elect the legislators. There's good reason to believe that repealing the 17th would not significantly change the federal-state balance of power.

The other great experiment in indirect election, the Electoral College, has devolved from people to points on a scoreboard. It never was a deliberative body. Electors are nominated as a reward for party loyalty, and they are punished by law if they dare to exercise the independent judgment that the Framers of the Constitution expected of them. (The Electoral College is still far better than nationwide popular vote, which would allow one fraudulent state to cancel the voting power of states with honest elections.)

(And if SQ 836 passes, you can bet that it will not produce a government full of wisely moderate and non-partisan officials.)

If elected officials aren't virtuous, more rules will only inspire their creativity in evading the new restraints. The remedy is to elect the good guys who are running for office and to give more good guys hope that, should they run, they'll have the backing of a majority of voters who are sufficiently courageous and perceptive to elect them instead of well-camouflaged bad guys. It does happen once in a while: Grant Miller is a good guy. Brian Guthrie is a good guy, even if his proposed Open Meeting Act reforms won't help as much as we'd hope. E'Lena Ashley is a good guy, and she needs your help right now to win re-election to the Tulsa school board this spring. (I could name a lot more good guys currently in public office, but I won't, for fear of leaving someone out.)

We're electing a long list of officials this fall. Character, principles, and savvy all matter. Big color postcards and expensive TV ads are there to fool you, not to inform you. Do your homework. I'll do my best to help.